Once they set out to brew a brut IPA, one of Sturdavant and other brewers’ main concerns was how to balance the hop flavor and bitterness in a beer that has hardly any malt character. Typically, malt sweetness balances hop bitterness; if you brewed a beer with no malt, it would taste like bitter hop water. Because the malts’ sugars get eaten up by this enzyme, they’d have to tone down the hop bitterness in their brut IPAs. Sturdavant says it’s a balancing act, trying to squeeze as much hop aroma and flavor into the brut IPA without making it too bitter.

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“It’s a lot about keeping the IBUs [international bitterness units] really low,” he says. “A regular IPA is around 55 IBUs. We’re somewhere between 22-25 with the brut IPA.”

The alcohol in the beer also contributes some sweetness, Gillooly says, but he still has to be careful to keep the hops’ bitterness down. He therefore adds his hops at a point in the brewing process where they’ll contribute more aroma to the beer while emitting less of their bitterness. Because the malt isn’t a factor at all in brut IPAs’ flavor, the resulting flavor is pure hops—just what most IPA fans are after.

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Given hops’ popularity with American craft-beer drinkers, it’s not surprising that examples of these aromatic, pale, super-dry brut IPAs have popped up across the country in the six months since Social Kitchen And Brewery first brewed batch one. But California is undeniably ground zero for the trend.

“I can’t say if it’s the next big thing, but it’s got a lot of brewers interested. I do think there is that subtext of ‘this is the West Coast responding to New England style.’ It’s really hit the collective consciousness out here,” Gillooly says.

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Brewers definitely have their own penchant for the style, and customers seem enthusiastic, too. Drake’s first brut IPA, Trocken, was the fastest-moving beer the brewery’s ever put on its draft lines, beating out the prior king—a hazy IPA. Bolstered by that success, Gillooly says he plans to put out six-pack bottles of a brut IPA as the brewery’s summer seasonal this year.

Thankfully for other brewers, the style’s originator, Kim Sturdavant, isn’t overly protective of his creation.

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“I’m curious to see what other people imagine and create going forward,” he says. “I don’t see it being, like, a Great American Beer Festival category or whatever, but maybe it fits into a category that could be like ‘alternative IPA’ where the brut IPAs are competing with black IPAs or hazy IPAs.”

Other brewers are more than happy to take the brut IPA ball and run with it. And given that the amylase enzyme can be ordered with just a quick call to a brewery supply company—if it’s not in the brewery’s toolbox already—the style should be popping up at taprooms across the country this summer and fall.

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“This could be a really significant departure from the way we’ve been doing and thinking about IPAs for a while,” Listermann’s Jared Lewinski says. “The way that you experience it on the palate is so different from any other IPA I’ve ever had. … I know a lot of people in the industry are super excited about this style, and maybe it’s because people are getting really tired of the over-sweet IPAs. Plus on the other hand, we don’t know where this is going yet.”